Horseshoe-shaped or “Indian Horseshoe?”
Every once in a while, one should take a good look at the language being used by people on social media (or other places) who are discussing certain subjects, such as those people looking at Culturally Stacked Stone features thought to be Indigenous made here in this corner of Turtle Island that became known as the “New England,” a subject close to my heart for three decades, a science long neglected.
Not that I’ve been
elected the Chief of Language Policemen by a vast majority of voters or
something but just in an effort to “get on the same page” of our independent
researchers’ notebooks, one could say. I’m just a guy with a blog, monitoring a
couple other blogs, and a few Face Book groups, offering an opinion or two now
and then...
SO:
Are they Rock Piles
or Cairns? Stone Prayers or Prayer Piles??
Are they stone
walls or stone fences?
Are they Yankee
Farmer Garbage Piles of field clearing stones or are they the “Religious
Furniture” or sacred stacked stone features of the Indigenous Cultural
Landscape??
Is that Face Book photo of a naturally occurring Rock Formation or an intentional human made stone construction?? Is it one or the other or both??? It certainly can’t be “neither” I’m reasonably sure…
And as Curtiss
also suggests, there are sometimes Indigenous names that are like little poems for
these features, such as Káhtôquwuk that suggests those culturally stacked stones
that have been stacked up as a form of prayer. Mavor and Dix in “Manitou”
pointed toward the Yurok of Northern California to show an example of
Indigenous People known to pray or perform ceremonial rituals by constructing sacred stone structures. One could cite Kroeber and
other ethnologists talking about a single stone on a boulder as a Prayer or a larger
U-shaped vision seat or Tsektsel, composed of many stones, possibly
incorporating a boulder (or more boulders or even no boulders – each one is a
unique construction) as a Ceremonial Stone Landscape feature.
Really: take a look
around out there and dive into all that has been written about these Prayer
Seats and stone vision quest structures (and other similar such structures with
a different purpose, such as Sleeping Circles and Eagle Traps etc.).
One
hears the denialists say, “You can’t do that!” This or that sometimes credentialed
Colonialistic/Nationalistic authority may shout, “Just because another culture
elsewhere in the hemisphere did that doesn’t mean that the now extinct Real Indians
of Rhode Island did the same thing here!”
Well, one
wonders, “Isn’t it really more like “everywhere” and not just an “elsewhere” or
two?
Well, one
wonders, “Just who inhabits the intellectual vacuum or just who indeed is practicing
a form of pseudoscience??”
Well, one wonders,
“Just who is committed to continuing to ethnically cleanse the indigenous from the
landscape, and the long human history, of the “New England??”
One may want to
consider those Indigenous voices, the Indigenous writers, those Indigenous
researchers who have begun to publicly speak about these culturally stacked
stone features. One may want to consider the nuances of traditional practices of
Mohegan, Narragansett, and other stone masons of Native American ancestry,
federally recognized or not, that still show up modernly: the places for
offerings to the spirits, including tribes of Little People, that still live on
the landscape, those effigies, the stacking styles and the iconography, the “snakes
and turtles” many pretend that they just can’t see.
So, yes probably one
may want to consider designating some U-shaped (Horseshoe-shaped) culturally
stacked stone features on the stony broken landscape where spirits love to
dwell, often a shared cultural space of different Indigenous homelands as a “Horseshoe”
or even an “Indian Horseshoe.” It’s very likely a “Prayer Seat” in Connecticut,
just as they are “out west” or on the continental divide, a semi-circular culturally
stacked stone feature used by religious practitioners for a wide variety of
uses, such as an isolated vision quest bed (a dreaming bed) or for other “contemplative
or spiritual purposes.”
(Oh my: Or “stone throwns,” someone boldly states,
out there online as I search for synonyms…)
One who finds oneself walking about the first
Colonial Connecticut town that wasn’t built on the site of an older Indigenous
village may well consider that “Shwihwakuwi” means ‘it grows around,” świ,
‘three’ for “3-sided” in the Mohegan-Pequot and Narragansett languages, as well
as “níswonki” in the Nipmuc language, also meaning an enclosure, which has "three
bends" that “form open ellipses that the author considers roughly
equivalent to the “nave” of a Christian church,” writes Nohham Rolf
Cachat-Schilling writing in Quantitative Assessment of Stone Relics in a
Western Massachusetts Town 2017, Bulletin of the Massachusetts
Archaeological Society. {https://www.academia.edu/40876478/Quantitative_Assessment_of_Stone_Relics_in_a_Western_Massachusetts_Town}
From my notes (taken outside the intellectual vacuum):
Tsektsel or
prayer seat (Yurok) “...tsekteya or tsekwel in Yurok (Kroeber 1976:381)...known
in English as "stone seats" or "stone chairs." They are
semicircular walls built of unmortared stones, piled about three or four feet
high. These were made as places to cry and shout for help, especially for
female Indian doctors seeking to obtain their power-enabling vision. There are
photographs of a similar structure in Kroeber and Gifford (1949:143)."
"The men go there and sit in the [prayer]
seat there. Then after a while they clap their hands, and if the echo comes
back clear they know they have what they’ve prayed for..."
“Other men shout,
listening for an echo."
Keeling, Richard in Cry for Luck: Sacred Song and Speech
Among the Yurok, Hupa, and Karok Indians of Northwestern California.
Berkeley: University of California
Press, c1992. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8g5008k8/
“Two small low walled stone enclosures on a ledge directly
above the petroglyph panels at Site 26LN211 most closely resemble vision quest
structures documented in the ethnographic record…”
Located on a narrow ledge directly above the panels of Site
26LN211, Stone Walled Enclosures 1 and 2 are small semi-circular walled
structures, their walls not exceeding three courses in height and their
interiors not exceeding two meters in width (see Figures 6-8). A miniature
piled “wall” occurs on a tiny rock ledge behind and slightly above each of the
big walled enclosures. Stone Walled Enclosure 1 is vertically above and behind
Panel 1A while Stone Walled enclosure is vertically above and behind Panels 4
and 5. Stone Walled Enclosure 2 contains a long and narrow rock slab that could
be a tiny monolith that once stood vertically. The bodily position to properly
fit into any one of the two small enclosures is either crouching down onto
one’s knees or lying flat in a curled-up fashion.
A virtual tour available on Stratum’s web site is based on
360° photographs taken at the site. This tour enables online visitors to walk
up to and through the site to view its panels and the surrounding landscape
from various distances and angles. Such a tour helps reduce the carbon
footprint by reducing the number of motor vehicles driving to the site
The Rock Eagle effigy was long thought to be the only rock
effigy in the Southeast. At least three sites have been confirmed to contain
effigies in Georgia, Rock Eagle (Fig. 11.3, 14), Little Rock Eagle/Rock Hawk
(Fig. 11.3, 13) and River Glen; while two have been confirmed in Alabama
(Holstein 2007a; 2007b). Those from Alabama are undated and represent snakes
but all Georgia rock effigies are recognized as birds. The effigies and piled
mounds at River Glen are associated with miniature late Lamar Wolfskin phase
bowls, dating to between 1540 and 1670 CE. A total of 56 rock features were
recorded at River Glen and are classified according to 11 different shapes,
including the effigies. It should be noted that shapes need not be
recognizable to the European eye to make them culturally meaningful to their
original creators, a fact supported by highly stylized and unidentifiable
petroglyphs and pictographs in the Southeastern US and farther abroad.
“It should be
noted that shapes need not be recognizable to the European eye to make them
culturally meaningful to their original creators, a fact supported by highly
stylized and unidentifiable petroglyphs and pictographs in the Southeastern US
and farther abroad…” – Jannie Loubser
http://www.stratumunlimited.com/uploads/4/8/1/5/4815662/management_planning_for_conservation.pdf
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